I decided to write this Thank You letter to the two companies who helped make my unemployment possible. I got the idea to do this after reading the JobLessandLess blog in which the blog’s owner thanked companies on his one year anniversary of being unemployed. I got such a kick out of his tweet that I wanted to take things one step further and write a letter.

To the employer(s) that made my unemployment possible, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. By sending me to the unemployment line, I no longer have to spend two hours a day in my car to commute to a place of work. I get to save the ten dollars a day I used to spend on buying overpriced lunches and sodas. Now that I am unemployed, I don’t have to pay income taxes or pay for overpriced co-pays at my physicians office. I would like to thank you for showing me that being a dedicated employee doesn’t pay off in the long run and for helping me realize that I could have been doing something else more productive with the overtime hours that I blindly gave to you. Thanks to your wonderful management and guidance, I no longer have to pay attention to the new car commercials because it will be years before I will be able to afford a new car, let alone be credit worthy enough to get one. The confidence that you showed in me, by letting me go, will help me stay away from malls this upcoming holiday season.

Having time to reflect, now that I am unemployed I feel fortunate to have worked for your company. I now realize that although I should not take being shown the unemployment line personal, it is very personal to me because I am the primary person that was affected by your thoughtful decision. The path that my life will take moving forward has been permanently altered thanks to you, so I hope you don’t take offense when I tell you that you are no longer on Christmas card list this year.

Outside of earning a salary for paying bills, putting a roof over your heads and having the ability to buy goods and services, what value does having a job bring outside of those fundamentals? Is it that important to have a place to go to in the morning, where you can share stories by the water cooler, or could it be a burning need to be a part of a larger social dynamic on a daily basis? Maybe having a job somehow validates the worth of your high school diploma, certification or college degree. Whatever your motivation maybe, what is the point of it all? What is the true purpose for having a job, and why I do I feel so desperate at times because I don’t have one.

There is a reason why time machines haven’t been invented yet. A time machine in the wrong hands would totally throw off the time continuum. I have a top ten list of places I would visit folded in my wallet just in case I get my hands on one. Number three on my list would be to find and muzzle the person or persons who decided on a five day work week, and then I would change it to a four day work week. Imagine having a three day weekend every weekend — that would be sweet, if I had a job. Wait a minute, by my not having a job, everyday is a weekend day for me.

One of the hurdles of being a member of the jobless nation, is that it takes a disciplined soul to keep your idle mind in check. It is a daily struggle filled with many highs and lows. Motivation to learn a new skill is burning up inside you one day, and then is totally cold the next. A week of walking or biking on trails, enjoying the simpler things in the life, is quickly replaced by a TV remote in one hand and a bag of Doritos in the other. It takes a lot of discipline to remain grounded and focused. Having a lot of free time on your hands is a lot of hard work which is why having a job is necessary.

Having a job saves us from ourselves. A job occupies that space in which our personal demons would eagerly fill with bad intentions, given the opportunity. Having a job keeps your social skills honest. I will be the first to admit, the longer I am out of the work environment, the more my social skills are declining at a rapid rate. I don’t feel the need to interact with the other animals, and to be quite honest, I am beginning not to miss it. I certainly don’t miss commuting to work, driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic wondering how in the hell did that moron in the gray SUV flip his vehicle over. There is one thing that I am missing while I spend my mornings eating Kashi cereal and watching reruns of Family Guy — I am missing a sense of purpose. I had one this time last year, however as of November 10, 2009 at 4:17 pm eastern standard time, I no longer have one. I am not sure exactly when I lost it. I do know, at this point it’s missing. Like a ship drifting in the sea, rudderless, I have no sense of purpose. In my rudderless world, my orange isn’t as orange anymore, and my Kashi cereal doesn’t thrill me the same anymore. Where is Tyler Durden when I need him? I could use some of his tough love to get me back on the path to finding my sense of purpose.

Does this mean I am doomed to spend the rest of my days on this planet being a non-productive, unmotivated, and uncaring individual? Do I need Jesus, Allah, Jehovah or Buddha in my life as many of my religious buds would suggest? I am truly walking in a hot desert having a deep conversation with Jim Morrison while trying to find that gravel of sand that will help keep me connected with the human race. I have had a front row seat watching my emotional state evolve since the day I joined the jobless nation. I have watched my anger turn to bitterness and my bitterness turn to darkness. Darkness as the void in space, with no atmosphere, no temperature, and no concern for it’s surroundings. I never realized that having a sense of purpose is so important and its effect on the human mind when you don’t have one. As much as I am starting to not miss the daily nuisances of going to work, the painful truth is that I need a job, which is the point of having a job.

If you are unemployed like me, I don’t have to tell you that being unemployed sucks. Each day unemployed is a day dealing with a wide variety of emotions. Feelings of good will are usually dashed after a few phone sessions with recruiters. Depressed feelings usually turn into fear, anxiety and hopelessness. Being unemployed is a sure sign, that smacks you in the face, that life isn’t fair. Not having a job to wake up to in the morning is a deep dark hole that is suffocating, if you allow it.

I will be the first to admit that I probably need therapy. I could use several bitching and whining sessions on a comfy couch to a stranger who claims that he/she can unlock the mysteries of my mind. However, since I am unemployed, with no health insurance, paying for therapy isn’t an option at the moment. I am not sure how our new digital leader health care reform bill helps the unemployed. It appears that although his intentions are noble, the government will find a way to screw us or screw it up if the bill is signed into law.

As you can imagine, bad management is a pet peeve of mind because it has unfortunately impacted my life negatively. I have seen enough bad management in my professional lifetime, that I could write a book on how to manage. All I would need to do is take what I have seen and put into words the opposite. I have encountered managers who were either bi-polar, insecure, untrustworthy, or just down right bad. I was fortunate to avoid most of the land mines in the toxic environment created by these individuals by being sociable, working hard and covering my assets. However, despite all of my dedication to being a good employee in the face of ineptitude, I found myself on the wrong side of management decisions. If it sounds like I have an axe to grind about some of my work experiences, you are correct. I was the type of employee that showed up for work everyday, rarely complained, kept my head down and tried to do my best under the most adverse situations. I was a company man, drone, worker bee who was to scared to rock the boat.

The key word is “was” because I am no longer afraid to rock the boat. All political correctness went out the door the day I was laid off from my last job. In retrospect, I now realize that having worked for several bad managers probably has done irreversible damage to my career. I am a by-product of career suicide, even though I had little or no control over the events that led to me being in this jobless situation. The decision of a faceless individual has caused my life to come to a stand-still, it sucks and I truly hope that person doesn’t sleep well at night. Despite my somewhat cynical and negative connotations, I do have a positive outlook on moving forward.

For the first time in my life I have a sense of freedom of not being one of the worker bees anymore. I am jobless, however I am no longer stressed out worrying that my boss has a bad perception about me because they can’t relate to my quirky ways. I no longer have to bite my tongue out of fear of losing my job because I disagree or have several questions about a project that is doomed to fail no matter how many hours I put in. Also, I am not the biggest loser in the office anymore and I am no longer a pawn in the popularity contest to sit on the right hand of my boss. Since it appears that God has chosen to look after bad managers, it’s only fair that I take control of my jobless situation and do what is necessary moving forward to create my own path.

The time has come to knock some dust off this blog. I started this blog initially because I needed to vent. The first few weeks were fantastic, I had plenty of material in my head that needed to be written. I used my unemployable technical skills to get the blog up and running. I wrote cool articles with cool pics. I studied SEO, traffic generation, social bookmarking, back linking and Black/White Hat techniques. I was ready to kick some ass and chew some gum and I was all out of gum. Then the unthinkable occurred, I lost my motivation and drive. The ideas were still percolating in my brain, however I couldn’t seem to get over the initial hump of opening this web browser and starting a post. My mind was trapped in a mental fog which felt like a painless, odorless gas that dulls your senses and saps your energy levels. I was still very angry and needed to vent, however I did not have the need to blog. Hours turned into days, days turned into weeks, as I was trapped in my state of “just being”. Writing just didn’t seem as therapeutic as it once did. This blog was going nowhere fast because Big G kinda frowns on static websites. This blog was fast becoming just a WOFT.

Then something totally unexpected happened — as I skipped across a golden field of corn, a unicorn holding a shiny new Mac Book Pro appeared to me and told me that I needed to get my head back in the game. He stressed that I need to write content for my blog and stop sitting around in a daze. Actually, the truth is that my motivation game back to me out of the blue. I don’t know what caused it, but I am glad that it happened. I think this has the makings of being an excellent blog someday. Moving forward, I pledge that I will make it a priority to add new content to this blog on a daily basis, as if this is a real paying job.

One of the most frustrating things about being an IT professional in the Baltimore/DC metro area is that there is an abundance of contracting jobs available if you have a security clearance.  Having a security clearance gives you the ability to work for many of the federal agencies in the area.  You can be a God amongst IT professionals in your area of discipline but unable to find work because you don’t have a security clearance.

If you do a quick search on a job board like Careerbuilder.com, you find many job listings requiring some type of security clearance.  You may say to yourself, if I am qualified to do the job, a contracting company will have no issues with helping me get a security clearance. Unfortunately, many contracting companies are reluctant to arbitrarily sponsor a perspective employee for a security clearance.  Sponsoring an individual for a security clearance is a long and expensive process. For those few companies that do sponsor individuals for security clearances, the individual usually ends up having to sign an indentured servant document stating if you decide to leave for another contractor, your current company can take legal action against you.

There are three general levels of security clearances: Confidential, Secret and Top Secret.

Confidential refers to material which, if improperly disclosed, could be reasonably expected to cause some measurable damage to the national security. The vast majority of military personnel are given this very basic level of clearance. This level needs to be re-investigated every fifteen years.

Secret pertains to the unauthorized disclosure of secret information could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security. This level is reinvestigated every ten years.

Top Secret pertains to individuals with this clearance who have access to information or material that could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security if it was released without authorization. This level needs to be reinvestigated every five years.

If you are an IT professional who has one of these clearances, especially Secret and Top Secret, you are sitting in a pretty sweet spot.  I remember a few years back, I worked at a federal agency with this recently retired Army Ranger who happened to have a Top Secret Poly clearance. He liked working at this federal agency because the job was low maintenance. During one of our breaks he mentioned that this recruiter had been bugging him to interview at another federal agency because they needed a system administrator with his clearance.  The former Army Ranger wasn’t interested in being a system administrator because of the demands of the job and knew he wasn’t qualified.  He told us that he would go to the interview just to get the recruiter to leave him alone, and to make sure he didn’t get the job he would show up to the interview wearing shorts.  You can imagine our surprise when the former Army Ranger told us that they made him a six figure job offer on the spot, and offered to send him to MCSE training at no cost.  He had a change of heart and decided to take the job because the salary was too good to pass up.

If you are one of those individuals like myself without any security clearances, you are pretty much screwed as a contractor for many government agencies.  You will have to really dig deep to find the government agencies that only require a Confidential “Public Trust” clearance to work as a contractor.  The Food and Drug Administration and Department of Treasury have a few departments in which one could find an IT job as a federal contractor.  As for myself, I decided to stop trying to look for IT  jobs as an federal contractor.  I made a lot of good friends and had a lot of fun during my time as a federal contractor.  As with most things, they must come to an end at some point.  I figure this would be a good time to switch gears and pursue other interests.

Unless you are an individual who enjoys having their life turned upside down every two to four years, working as a federal contractor sucks.  The concept behind the need for contractors to work side by side federal employees has been flawed for many years.  Needing a contractor to fill a position tells me that the process to become a federal employee is too bureaucratic heavy or why else would an agency be having a hard time finding  someone.  You can also consider that the hiring process to work for a federal contractor is flawed as well. Companies that win bids to do federal contracts are often bound to unrealistic parameters for hiring.

For the purpose of this article I would like to focus mainly on the IT federal contracting as that is where all of my experience on the subject comes from.  I live near the Washington D.C. metro area, and I have been working in IT for over ten years.  For many of those years I was grunt “contractor” working at some of your well known federal agencies.  Why would I continue to work as a contractor when I clearly loathe the concept, you ask? Quite honestly, I didn’t know any better.  I was Neo before he took the red pill, happy and clueless, being used as a grunt as long as the paychecks were coming in.  As you can imagine, there are a lot of staffing companies in the area that bid on numerous IT contract positions for the federal agencies.

The general concept behind being a contractor at a federal agency is that you work with federal employees, do all of the same type or tasks a federal employee would do, except you do not have the job security of a federal employee.  Most companies that hire you to contract, will hire you as an at-will employee.  As an at-will employee you could be dismissed from your job without warning.  You have very little chance of recourse if this happens.  I would love to tell you that the only contractors I have seen dismissed were due to poor work performance, however I would be lying.  I have seen way too many contractors let go due to some unwarranted perception or a bias coming from a mis-informed federal manager.

As a contractor, you will never be officially a part of the cool kids, “federal employees.”  Like most popularity contests, you face all of the problems of not being a part of the click.  You have to abide by a different set of rules even though you share the same office space.  For example, I used to work for this agency that had this huge fancy enclosed computer room that we called the fish bowl.  We called it the fish bowl because two sides of the room were mostly glass.  Whenever the agency needed to give a tour, the visitors would be taken to the fish bowl to see all of the fancy machines and hard workers behind the glass.  The federal boss made a decision that no one could eat or drink while at your cubicle. If you had the need for a snack, you could leave it outside the room and go outside the room to eat.  I didn’t have a problem with the rule at first, until I realized that it didn’t apply to the federal employees.  I watched them eat their lunch, and some times their dinner, right in front of me.  I later found out that one of the federal employees complained to the union, and the union overturned the manager’s request for us not to eat in the room.

Accrued leave was another sore spot for me for several reasons.  As you may already know, the federal government is closed on Columbus Day and Veterans Day. I would also like to throw in Black Friday, an “unofficial government holiday.”  Most contracting companies will not pay you for those days. Either you use your leave or you have to come into the contractor’s home office that day to be compensated.  My other issue with accrued leave is that for example, I work for Company A for three years and have 120 hrs of leave built up.  If Company A loses out to Company B when the contract is up for rebid and I am fortunate enough to be retained by Company B, I have to start all over from zero leave.  You end up doing a job for 4 yrs but then all of a sudden you have the same amount of accrued leave as someone who just started yesterday.  I have seen only one instance of a company winning the bid and then to grandfather the employees so they retained their accrued leave.

The most nerve-racking time for a federal contractor is when the contract you are on is placed up for re-bid.  It is a non issue if the company you are working for wins.  However, if another company wins, all bets are off for several reasons.  More often than not, the winning company severely under bids the contract to win.  Therefore, you can expect that when the changeover happens, some people will not be retained, and it’s possible the lucky ones that do hold onto their jobs will be asked to take a reduction in salary. Workplace morale is usually at its lowest point during this time.  I can remember my initial reaction when I was asked to take a $7,000 pay cut.  I can tell you that it wasn’t a positive one.  I dropped a few f-bombs, however I reluctantly agreed because having a paycheck was better than none at all.

I am sure there are some individuals out there who find being a federal contractor to be a wonderful experience.  If that is the case, I must admit I am jealous because I didn’t have those experiences.  I am no longer a federal contractor nor do I have the desire to ever do it ever again in my life.

“Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.”  ….The Architect sharing his wisdom to Neo.

Denial is a very predictable human response.   Instead of listening to my intuition that was telling me that the job I had was a dead end job, I somehow believed that I would make a difference.  I ignored the fact that I had worked 380 hrs of unpaid overtime and received no raises or bonuses during the two year time frame I was an employee.  I believed that karma was on my side because I was doing the right things, and in turn the company would do right by me.  I continued to be a good worker bee, even after they transferred me to another department, abolished my position, and gave me the opportunity to interview for a lower level position in my old department.  I was insulted by the fact that I had to interview for a level 2 job that I had already been doing as a level 3.  I was in denial and desperate enough to do it.  I was being predictable in every way, until for some reason I can’t explain, I decided that I wasn’t going to be a worker bee anymore.

Have you ever noticed that your co-workers who are assholes rarely get fired and even when they do, they always seem to land on their feet?  I used to wonder — why does karma reward them, it just doesn’t seem fair.  I am reminded that right and wrong is of human origin and that the sense of fairness does not always land on the side of those who do the right things.  The worker bee mentality is one where you always feel like or end up being the victim.

I realized that I could no longer in good conscience be the same type of worker that I have been in the past. I had what you could call a mental reboot, my friends would probably tell you that I had a mental break.   The sun didn’t come up the next day like it did in the Matrix, however I did have a few new ground rules about how I plan to be moving forward.  First and foremost, I am officially retired in the corporate sense.  I have no desire to work under the premise that I will be promoted or look forward to raises.  Work to me is nothing more than an exchange of goods and services between employer and employee.  I figure that keeping this perspective will keep me motivated and focused on pursuing other streams of income.  I refuse to ever again setup my workspace as a home away from home.  Whatever I can fit in my backpack is all that I will take with me to work.  I decided that I would strip away all the layers of bullshit and accept the fact that I am strictly in it for the money.

I decided that I can no longer follow the doctrine of the herd mentality.  The day I do become employed again, I am going in with the attitude from day one that the employee/employer relationship is a two channel affair.  I consider my time to be of high value, and while on the clock the company will get the best that I can give.  However,  I  do not give out freebies, there will be no unwritten expectation that I will work additional hours and not receive some type of compensation.  If that is the case then they need to go find a worker bee to hire.  I am no longer interested in climbing the corporate ladder because chasing it has become nothing but fools good to me.  My Matrix has been rebooted.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I am pissed off about being unemployed.  Like many of you, I showed up to work on time, worked long hours, gave a 110% effort and sacrificed quality time with family and friends for the sake of my job.  I feel betrayed and that I deserve something better for myself and family.  I have been laid off twice during this year.  The first layoff, I saw coming and had prepared myself by looking and interviewing for jobs before hand.   The second layoff, I didn’t see coming, it totally took my surprise. That day I decided to have a talk with my two uncles “Jack Daniel and Jim Beam.”  Talking to them always puts me a better frame of mine.  They helped me realize that the initial hurt will pass, the intensity of my anger will lessen, and most importantly they told me to go have fun.  It’s funny how my two uncles are so very wise, especially during my time of need. My two uncles suggested that I use this time to do the things that I really enjoy doing instead of the knee jerk reaction of desperation that I have done in the past.  It was suggested that I spend sometime pursuing other interests while having this unfortunate downtime and to use this time to rediscover a sense of purpose.  I think ultimately what my two uncles were trying to tell me that I shouldn’t get to down on myself and I should think outside of the box as to ways to resolving this matter.

Are you currently unemployed due to downsizing,  misconduct on the job,  or just bad luck with employment? The current economy is rough and a lot of us out here are struggling.  The price of goods and services is skyrocketing, while our take home income is constantly shrinking.  Losing a job stinks and the sudden change in lifestyle can be downright demoralizing.   Having to rely on savings and unemployment  benefits to make ends meet is another level of stress that one should not have to endure.  There is an inner voice that is angry, frustrated and not heard.  Use this site as an outlet to voice your opinions, frustrations, rants or whatever you feel like discussing about the current job market.  Your opinion matters — help build a strong united voice for the jobless nation.